Relying on these types of templates is a one-way ticket to technical debt on top of the technical debt of already using LangChain.

Can you expand a bit on what makes langchain tech-debt? Ive been dabbling for a few days and have seen it referenced but I've never used it. Looking at it, it seems focused on being a library for interacting with LLMs, and a pile of utils to go with that library. I tend not to use "library and utils" packages for my own personal projects, but beyond that I don't see on the surface what makes langchain tech-debt. Can you explain more?

I'm glad you asked because I wrote an entire blog post on it a few months ago! https://minimaxir.com/2023/07/langchain-problem/

That post also gets a very surprising amount of Google traffic.

Have you taken a closer look at AutoGen? I am interested to know how you think it compares to LangChain.

AutoGen (https://github.com/microsoft/autogen) is orthogonal: it's designed for agents to converse with each other.

The original comparison to LangChain from Microsoft was Guidance (https://github.com/guidance-ai/guidance) which appears to have shifted development a bit. I haven't had much experience with it but from the examples it still seems like needless overhead.